Bridging the Divide: Teachers Being Trained to Match Tech-Savvy Students

THE race is on in earnest to equip graduate teachers with the necessary skills in order to match increasingly tech-savvy students.

The intervention, one of several under the e-Learning Jamaica project, has seen lecturers being trained and given the mammoth task of being instructional technology leaders in their colleges to ensure that all graduate teachers leave with the skills and competencies required to effectively use the technology now in high schools.

"I am more concerned about implementation, I am in the classroom, I am facing students, I am looking at training teachers to go out there in the world of work. In an environment where our students are digital natives, meaning they were born in the digital era and they have to interact with teachers who are digital immigrants — they are learning about the digital era — we have to provide a space for this to take place," Denise Stoney-James, education technologist and lecturer at GC Foster College, told the Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange yesterday. She said the teacher envisioned looks far different from the teacher of two decades ago, which is not surprising, considering that the student has also changed. "We are training them to deal with 21st century students. It's difficult, it's in an environment where there are limited resources, but we want them to know that we do not teach the same way in which they learn, we have to meet these students at their level and their level means we have to be able to speak like them, we have to be able to think like them," Stoney-James said. Meeting students on their level, she said, also involves being able to master the use of social media, utilising it as an instructional tool.

"So, for example, they are used to using Facebook for fun activities, how is it that we use Facebook as a blog to have meaningful discussions? How do we use Twitter as a micro blog? So with the teachers from a different era interacting with students from this era there is a challenge, but we are, as a group, trying to bridge that divide to see how is it we can make learning more interesting for these students, because learning can be boring if they are not interested in what you are saying," she told the Exchange.

"They are not used to reading a book, these students are not into reading, we had to do that because there was nothing else for us to do. The idea is how do we reach this generation at a level they find fun and exciting," Stoney-James added. Noting that there was "a challenge with technology in this era in the use of (search engines such as) Google to copy and paste (information)" she said "there is a way around that". "There is plagiarism software and if the students know you use it, they won't plagiarise," she pointed out. 

In the meantime, Dr Jeanette Bartley-Bryan, associate vice-president at the Office of Distance Learning Academic Affairs Division the University of Technology, Jamaica, said the issue of social responsibility becomes even more of an imperative with the use of technology in this area. "When we use social media and we have our younger generation who use it for fun, what we are seeing from the educational perspective is that we have to teach about what is private knowledge and public knowledge, because what we will find is our students sharing everything, some of which is inappropriate," Bartley-Bryan told the Exchange.

"So this is where the university comes in, because we have to help to reinforce the ethics behind it and the social responsibility of what we share. So not everything should be put out there in the public sphere," she noted.